Pora v The Queen (New Zealand)
| Jurisdiction | UK Non-devolved |
| Judge | Lord Kerr |
| Judgment Date | 03 March 2015 |
| Neutral Citation | [2015] UKPC 9 |
| Date | 03 March 2015 |
| Docket Number | Appeal No 0081 of 2013 |
| Court | Privy Council |
[2015] UKPC 9
Lord Kerr
Dame Sian Elias
Lord Reed
Lord Hughes
Lord Toulson
Appeal No 0081 of 2013
Privy Council
From the Court of Appeal of New Zealand
Appellant
Jonathan Krebs Ingrid Squire Malcolm Birdling Kim McCoy
(Instructed by Alan Taylor and Co)
Respondent
Michael Heron QC Mathew Downs Zoe Hamill
(Instructed by Crown Law Office (New Zealand)
Heard on 4 and 5 November 2014
Susan Burdett was raped and murdered in her home in March 1992. In May 1994 the appellant was convicted of both crimes (and of aggravated burglary of Ms Burdett's home) following a jury trial. In 1999 the New Zealand Court of Appeal quashed the convictions and ordered a re-trial. On his re-trial before Williams J and a jury in March 2000 he was again found guilty. The appellant again appealed to the Court of Appeal. That court dismissed the conviction appeal in October 2000. This appeal lies from that decision.
Two principal grounds of appeal are advanced on behalf of the appellant. The first is that the confessions which he made concerning his complicity in the crimes (and which the appellant asserts constituted the main evidence against him) have been shown to be unreliable. The second ground is that evidence concerning another man who was convicted of the rape of Ms Burdett should have been admitted at the appellant's trial. This evidence, it is submitted, would have cast considerable doubt on the Crown case that the appellant had been present when Ms Burdett was raped and killed.
Martha McLoughlin is Teina Pora's cousin. She has claimed that in the week after Ms Burdett's murder the appellant told her that he had discarded a softball bat in a drain near a sports venue called the Manukau Velodrome. According to Ms McLoughlin, Pora told her that the bat was blood-stained. Richard Marcus Bennett, the brother of Pora's girlfriend, gave evidence on the appellant's re-trial. He testified that some days after the murder, he and others, including Teina Pora, had been in the vicinity of the velodrome and that Pora had looked into a culvert and then had pointed out that a bat was visible. Bennett and the others looked into the culvert and saw part of a baseball bat. According to Bennett, Pora said that this could have been the bat which "wasted the lady in Pah Road". Ms Burdett had lived and was murdered in a house in Pah Road.
It is at least distinctly possible that the murder weapon was a baseball or softball bat but it has never been possible to identify conclusively a particular bat as the one which was used to inflict the fatal injuries. The only two bats which featured in the evidence as possible candidates for the murder weapon were the bat found in the pipe or drain near the velodrome and a baseball bat which the deceased had kept beside her bed. This baseball bat was found on the deceased's bed after the discovery of her body. Although neither bat could be directly linked to the murder, the jury on the second trial heard evidence that an implement such as a baseball bat was, as the trial judge directed them, the "kind of thing … consistent with" the injuries that she had suffered.
The appellant was interviewed by police twice in 1992. On 7 April 1992 he made a statement to a detective constable that he had seen a baseball bat in a concrete pipe. Nothing further of significance emerged at that interview. Pora was interviewed again on 28 May 1992. He denied having made the remarks to his cousin or to Bennett which they had recounted to police.
On 18 March 1993 the appellant, then aged 17, was arrested in relation to a vehicle which had been stolen. After having been questioned about this, he told one of the interviewing detectives that "mobsters" had been looking for him and that he was scared of them. He then asked whether the police had apprehended anyone for the murder of Ms Burdett. When he was told that they had not, he said that he knew who had committed the crime. He was then told about a reward for information leading to the conviction of the offenders. He replied that this was "no good" to him as the mobsters would "find out". One of the interviewing officers then told him that, at the discretion of the Solicitor General, an indemnity against prosecution could be available for anyone who was not a principal offender. A form was produced which purported to clarify the circumstances in which such an indemnity might be available and this was explained to the appellant. After an initial failure to comprehend, Pora claimed to have understood it.
There then followed a series of interviews which continued over four days during which Pora gave various accounts of his knowledge of and later his involvement in the invasion of Ms Burdett's home, the attack on her, the rape that was perpetrated on her and, eventually, the circumstances in which she was murdered. It is unnecessary to rehearse the content of those interviews at length. Pora's accounts are strewn with inconsistencies, contradictions, implausibility and vagueness. At various times his replies to questions are halting, hesitant, incoherent and bizarre. A few examples will be sufficient to illustrate the nature of his responses.
Initially, Pora claimed that he had taken two men whom he identified only as "Dog" and "Hound" to Ms Burdett's home to carry out a burglary. At first he claimed that he did not know their true names. After the burglary, they had returned to his car carrying a baseball bat with blood on it. Soon after he gave this account, Pora accompanied police to a house where he said that Dog and Hound lived. On his return to the police station he said that he had lied about his involvement in the murder. He said that he had gone to Ms Burdett's home but only as a lookout. He did not enter the house. Within a short time of giving this version, however, he said that he did indeed go into the house and there observed Dog and Hound raping Ms Burdett.
During an interview at 2.24pm on the 18 March he said that on the day of the murder he had gone to Superstrike (a ten pin bowling alley where Ms Burdett played regularly). Dog and Hound had come up to him and told him that they were going to follow Ms Burdett's car, with Pora driving the following vehicle. He agreed to do this and drove behind Ms Burdett's car to her home, he said. Despite this and despite the fact that he was an experienced car thief, he was quite unable to describe the car, to identify its make or model or to say whether it was small or large. When he was taken by police on a drive designed to show his route to Ms Burdett's house, he appeared disorientated, unable without assistance to indicate the way to her house and had great difficulty in identifying the house even when he was standing directly outside it.
It was on the issue of how entry to the house was obtained, however, that Pora was at his most vague and inconsistent, not only when he accompanied police to the property but also in the accounts given during interview. At first he claimed that he had climbed through a window; then he said that he had waited outside the back door and was admitted to the house by Dog. This complete volte-face occurred within the space of three transcribed lines and two successive questions on the interview record. Later during interview on 18 March he said that all three had climbed through a window. But within moments he said that Hound had gone in through the door. Then he reverted almost immediately to the account that all three had climbed through the window. At 6.18 pm on the same day, when he was at Ms Burdett's home with police officers he suggested that all three of them had climbed through a window by the back door.
Pora was also wildly inconsistent about the part that he had played in the events of the evening that Ms Burdett was killed, claiming at times that he did not witness the killing, having been out of the room when it had occurred and at others admitting to having struck Ms Burdett and held her down while she was attacked. These variations are not, in themselves, unduly surprising. Criminals who admit their crimes frequently seek in the first instance to play down their role. But this does not explain why radically different accounts of the parts played by Dog and Hound were given. One consistent feature was that Dog had raped Ms Burdett but, as to Hound's actions, Pora's account differed dramatically and often within a few consecutive sentences of a particular version having been given. He said at various times that Hound had raped Ms Burdett as well as Dog and then at others he insisted that Hound had not done so at all. No discernible reason for these remarkably different versions can be gleaned from the transcript of the interviews.
Of course, all these circumstances have to be viewed against the background that there was no evidence whatever (apart from Pora's word) that the two men, whom he referred to for most of the interviews as Dog and Hound, had anything whatever to do with Ms Burdett's rape and murder. Although at first he refused to, or claimed to be unable to, give the true names of the men, Pora later admitted that he knew them as Roy Wong Tung and Gert. In the event, DNA recovered from the body of Ms Burdett was linked to Malcolm Rewa who was subsequently convicted of having raped her; Roy Wong Tung and Gert gave blood samples in order to establish their DNA and, on the basis of the results obtained, were eliminated from the inquiry. Rewa has been found guilty of no fewer than 24 sexual offences against women, many of these bearing strikingly similar characteristics and in most, if not all, he acted alone.
At the invitation of the interviewing police officers, Pora drew an outline of the body of Ms Burdett as she lay on the bed during the attack on her....
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